i have a harddrive that currently has freebsd 6.3 on it. ive used it for years and was wondering if there was any possible way i can recover files on it, even though it has been reformatted probably more than 20 times and have had probably 10 - 15 different operating systems on it. is this possible? if so, can someone point me in the right direction... thank you.

No disrespect or offense meant LateNiteTV, but I do think this is the craziest question I've read in a long time....

If the disk has been reformatted numerous times and had several OSes installed on it after FreeBSD was 'overwritten', the only reliable method is via backups. One good thing about backups, you generally can be sure of what you will get back out of them, with suitable storage....

i have a harddrive that currently has freebsd 6.3 on it. ive used it for years and was wondering if there was any possible way i can recover files on it, even though it has been reformatted probably more than 20 times and have had probably 10 - 15 different operating systems on it. is this possible? if so, can someone point me in the right direction... thank you.

The programs ddrescue, testdisk and photorec (part of the testdisk port) are the standard data recovery toolkit. If the data on the disk has not been overwritten, these should recover it for you. But none of these will work if the actual data has been overwritten.

If you have reformated and installed on the disk, you should consider the data overwritten. If you need to recover data from a disk that is in use, you should pull the plug from the system NOW (No, do not shut down cleanly!), connect the drive to another system, and use ddrescue to take an image of the drive to work on. That said, it is almost certainly too late.

However, if you are asking if a determined someone could recover data from that disk (say, for industrial espionage or evidence gathering), you should consider data to remain on the disk until it has been ground into tiny bits, degaussed for hours and mixed into the asphalt when repaving the parking lot. (Yes, actual practice in some highly sensitive establishments!)

__________________The only dumb question is a question not asked.
The only dumb answer is an answer not given.

The last paragraph in robbak's post is a work of fiction, government agencies overwrite data multiple times because they're paranoid, absolute recovery is likely impossible.. determining the previous state of a single bit alone is theoretical, actually restoring enough of an original bit pattern would be improbable.

For example, the ksh shell on OpenBSD 4.3 is 324,992 bytes in length, 324,992*8 = 2,599,936 bits arranged in a unique pattern to form the executable.

I've yet to find any concrete evidence that recovery of data after being overwritten is possible..

The last paragraph in robbak's post is a work of fiction, government agencies overwrite data multiple times because they're paranoid, absolute recovery is likely impossible.. determining the previous state of a single bit alone is theoretical, actually restoring enough of an original bit pattern would be improbable.

For example, the ksh shell on OpenBSD 4.3 is 324,992 bytes in length, 324,992*8 = 2,599,936 bits arranged in a unique pattern to form the executable.

I've yet to find any concrete evidence that recovery of data after being overwritten is possible..

Note that, with most text-based data, if you could get four bytes out of 5, you would have enough to recover the material. Bitwize, I'd back myself to read ascii with an average of one error bit in 16 any day.

__________________The only dumb question is a question not asked.
The only dumb answer is an answer not given.